Gosh, I’m really getting confused about these threads! Sorry everybody for mis-identifying people who have written to me! How many PhDs does it take to change a lightbulg? (please don’t try to answer that question!)
Anyway, yes, condan, I did sort of realize that the sheep analogy was a bad one. Happy to follow Jesus Christ like a sheep, but I’m less happy to follow He Who Sits in Peter’s Chair. There’s an awful lot we don’t know about the early Church – and not everything we DO know makes for nice reading.
One of “my” (14th-century) heretics once made a joke (reported to the inquisitor, of course): “IF the Pope ties a donkey’s tail on earth, does that mean that the donkey’s tail is tied in Heaven?”
And condan, I did live in New York once upon a very, very long time ago. I was a very unhappy and lonely young woman, a very recent Catholic convert, and I never did find any church where I felt at home. So it really was (and remains!) a real question. Of course there are a bazillion churches in New York. I can even name a couple of them, like St. Vincent Ferrer’s up on the Upper East Side where I went to an Easter Vigil once. Nice music – but the priest who heard my confession there was a real doozy (should have known better than to go to a Dominican church!). I really, honestly am looking for a congenial church to go to mass to this sunday. I may have located something on the Call to Action website, and people here have given me some useful suggestions.
Catholic AND Anglican? Well, I grew up Episcopalian, and converted to the Catholic Church when I was 19. I spent some time in a French Benedictine monastery in my 20s. I used to go to an Episcopalian monastery in Cambridge, MA for Compline every night. In recent years (and especially since my move here), I have not been very happy with my local Catholic options, so I regularly attend an Episcopalian “gathering” in a one-room schoolhouse in a nearby hamlet. I realize you’re probably not comfortable with that kind of ecumenism, but I am.
But enough about me.
Naprous
